Good idea. Losing them in there would be a hassle.

I mean, at that point it could also be a Neal Stephenson novel.

Windows 360¹ will cost 30 bucks a year (adjusted for inflation) and will automatically upgrade you to the latest version of Windows as soon as it comes out. Additional benefits include improved security by blocking non-Store software and having your OS settings managed by Microsoft – Windows 360 will even automatically restore them if they should end up getting changed, e.g. if Recall somehow ends up disabled.

¹ Not to be confused with Windows 365, which is an entirely different thing.

I think Rainbow Six 3 might also qualify.

Then again, nothing will ever compare to the Rocket Arena 3 scene where every kill was due to skill. You're a complete noob who got a few lucky hits with the rocket launcher? Skill. The other guy jumps in front of you just as you happen to pull the trigger? Nice air rail, well played. I never saw anyone ever complain about losing.

That community was just so refreshingly positive and welcoming, probably because there were no stakes. A match was over in maybe thirty seconds and then you'd watch until your next turn. And that was it.

In modern competitive games people have a ranking and they feel stressed when a game goes badly because they might lose precious Elo. This goes to the point where you get yelled at by your own teammates for not knowing the meta because they can't make it to the next rank if you pay like it's a game.

Dude never said how much profit the founder has to make. Anyone with a company that only does a small amount of paid work every couple weeks qualifies. Even after overheads those are probably profits and the founder has plenty of time for his numerous hobbies and pristine sleep schedule.

Not sure what kind of ROI this entrepreneur expects from investing there but hey, it's his money.

Having just read through that page I have to say that his friend's story about the heavily armed Asian gang shooting up a mall to steal a Mortal Kombat cabinet is one of the best things I've ever read. It's like a novelization of a PAYDAY 2 heist.

Then again, humans are also pretty samey from an outside perspective. There aren't many humans who openly reject the Federation's ideals. A small number of exceptions does exist but other species get those as well. Even the Maquis still behave like Federation people; while they fight their own little war they generally do that while adhering to Federation standards.

In the case of Worf, though, he's extra Klingon. Which isn't all that unusual; second-generation immigrants sometimes lean extra hard into their perceived home culture despite the fact that they only know how their parents act and miss out on a lot of subtleties. I can imagine that even other Klingons think he's weird for listening to nothing but Klingon opera.

But yeah, in general Star Trek does simplify; species have one culture and planets have one biome. Then again, the narrative usually wouldn't be helped by lines like "it's a beautiful, verdant planet except for where you'll beam down, which is an asbestos desert that looks like a bowl of used cat litter" or "we're going to rendezvous with a Klingon ship but the crew are part of this subculture that doesn't consider physical combat valid and exclusively dresses in yellow".

We do see more detail with cultures the story spend a lot of time around; e.g. the Bajorans are shown to be multi-faceted because those facets are relevant to the narrative.

Good season so far. I'm following four shows (as I usually do) and I'm happy that three of them are good to great.

Dan Da Dan is a rare instance of a show that can do everything. The characters are enjoyable, the comedy is on point, the action is punchy and easy to follow, and the show can even pull off drama really well when it wants to. Impressive. I don't have much else to say, really.

Orb is the freshest work I've seen since Frieren. Possibly fresher than Frieren, actually.

There are virtually none of the staples ones would expect from anime; there is no world to be saved and society itself is more the villain than the literal torturer is. Stakes are personal but feel high. Action is very limited and it's mostly a science-philosophical exploration of theological dogma through the lens of astronomy. It's basically like a particularly talky Star Trek episode but in medieval Poland.

On top of that, the characters, presentation, and story are all of high quality.

I didn't think the industry had something like this in it and it might beat Dan Da Dan as my anime of the season. While Dan Da Dan's punches land flawlessly, Orb is a master of an entirely different martial art, one rarely seen in the genre.

Demon Lord 2099 is nothing particularly special but is a solid example of getting your balance right. The magical and cyberpunk aspects of the show are well-balanced, as are mild comedy, action, and drama. The show is aware that it can't take itself too seriously. Honestly, the most jarring element is the random V-tuber cameo that fails to match the art style. All in all a good mix, although not one that I will really remember much about in a few years.

Mecha-Ude is a nice example of a show that doesn't know where it's strengths lie. The story is bland and clumsily told, the protagonist may as well not have bothered showing up, the action is stale, and the show is really bad at drama but thinks that's one of its strengths. What it is good at is being silly – honestly, this could've worked well as a zany comedy. Its near-total lack of self-awareness keeps is from capitalizing on that, however.

I say it's orthogonal. Like others have pointed out, the important question is whether the game is structured in an easily extensible way.

If the interfaces are stable (or at least versioned and changing relatively slowly), you can mod the game easily. This holds for OpenXcom just like for Skyrim.

If the game is not designed to be modded, modding will be a lot harder and mods will break frequently. Then even slight changes can end up breaking all mods. This holds for any mod-unfriendly have that gets updates.

Locked behind premium currency. Put enough cash on the table and you can start that quest whenever you want.

Also, once you realize you're an enby you kinda live in several of these stages at once.

Ja, das wirkt wie eine Qualitätsbescheinigung von unabhängiger Stelle, hat aber die Aussagekraft von "trust me, bro".

Wie aber anderswo schon angemerkt wurde, gab es damals noch nicht die Palette an unabhängigen Prüfern, wie wir sie heute kennen, und die Regularien waren viel lascher. Viel mehr als "wir liefern kontrollierte Qualität, schwöre Bruder" gab es einfach gar nicht.

And diagnosis is only the first quest in a chain. The following quests aren't much easier to find.

NATO without the USA loses a lot of logistical and conventional power but is still backed by French and British nukes. That should still make Putin wary of actually triggering Article 5.

Besides, Germany has already demonstrated how effectively it can use a war economy so a conventional war against NATO-without-the-States would probably either be quick or an attrition slog. And I don't think that Russia has the means to pull off either without directly bringing China into the war.

I do agree that Europe should do more, although Russian psyops have been effective over here as well – fringe parties are on the rise and conveniently all of them happen to like Russia. What a coincidence. That plus the economic downturn expected after Trump takes a sledgehammer to global trade again puts a damper on our effectiveness.

This is a case of you having some very specific requirements that can only be met in a certain way, that being Windows in this case. Whether or not a switch makes sense depends on how important those requirements are to you. Seems perfectly reasonable to me.

I personally found the ability to override a game's rendering settings to only be worth it in very few cases but that's me. But if you use it a lot then you use it a lot.

As for AI upscaling, my main issue there is that Nvidia chose a name so generic that it's hard to google. And then they made a second unrelated feature with a very similar name.

There is AI video upscaling for Linux but it probably doesn't work quite the same way Nvidia's offering does. That might be a problem or it might not; I admittedly only invested a minute to look it up so I don't have any details.

The same applies to SDR-to-HDR. There seems to be something but it probably doesn't work like what you currently use.

So in the end you'll have to decide whether you'd be more annoyed by not having those features or by having to use whatever zany shit Microsoft come up with. Not a great decision but that's life.

I personally might have stuck with Windows longer on my desktop if my 4080 hadn't turned out to be wonky and Nvidia's driver hadn't turned out to be so capricious that I had to spend two months ruling out plausible error causes. That drove me back to AMD, which made the switch easy. But again, that's me and not you.

Ah, the old Nvidia problem. It's true that Nvidia's Linux driver isn't very good (although I don't think their Windows driver is very good either, it just has more features).

The 3D Settings page is specific to the Nvidia Windows driver. Even an AMD user might've been slightly confused (although AMD ships comparable features, just located elsewhere under a different name). This is indeed something the Linux drivers plain don't have in that form, although I can't remember the last time I felt a need to really muck around in there.

Admittedly, overriding game rendering behavior might not even always be possible, seeing that DirectX games are run through a translation layer before the GPU gets to do anything.

I wasn't able to find solid info for AI upscaling even on Windows, mainly because of the terrible name of that feature and because Nvidia offers both "AI Upscaling" and "Nvidia Image Scaling" and I have no idea if those are the same thing. The former seems to be specific to the Nvidia SHIELD.

Unless you're talking about DLSS, which is supported.

The HDR one is odd but might again be related to the Nvidia driver not being very good. This should improve in the future but they are admittedly trailing behind.

That's less of an issue these days. In the 2000s it was like that, especially since people used all sorts of add-in cards. These days a lot of those cards have merged with the mainboard (networking, sound, USB) or have fallen out of fashion (e.g. TV tuners).

The mainboard stuff is generally well-supported. The days of the Winmodem are over. The big issues these days are special-purpose hardware (which generally doesn't work with later Windows versions either), laptops, and Nvidia GPUs (which are getting better).

Tossing Gentoo onto an old Pentium III box, typing emerge world and coming back four hours later to see if it's done was awesome.

And no, it wasn't done compiling KDE yet.

But I definitely wouldn't want to experiment with Linux on my only PC with no way to look things up if I break networking (or the whole system). Thankfully, this is no longer an issue in the age of smartphones.

Well, there's the odd hybrid that is OpenTyrian. The code is GPL2 and the assets are separately available as freeware (ie. gratis but not free-as-in-speech). That puts it in the same boat as e.g. OpenXcom (free engine, nonfree assets) but makes it slightly cheaper.

Tyrian is a bit unique as a shmup; you don't immediately die when you get hit and you get to customize your ship. Development of the open source engine has been extremely slow (the last release is two years old) but then again the project just aims to be a modern implementation of one specific MS-DOS game and it does that job just fine.